The Breath of God (44 page)

As he didn't realize when the dream began, he also didn't realize when it ended. He thought the weight pressing down on the bed next to him was something happening in his mind, not anything real.

Even when his hand touched warm, bare flesh, he turned that into part of the dream—a part that mingled sweet and bitter almost unbearably. But the soft, throaty laugh he heard then couldn't possibly have sprung from inside his own mind.

His eyes flew open. “Who the—?” he burst out. Liv, come to apologize the best way she knew how? Gudrid, come to torment him the best way
she
knew how? A serving girl, come to make sure he slept sound after all? No matter how kindly Eyvind Torfinn might mean that, Hamnet didn't want a stranger. To say he didn't want Gudrid proved what a weak reed words were. Liv . . . would hurt him more than she helped, though she might not understand that.

“Never mind who.” The answer came in the Bizogot tongue, so it wasn't Gudrid or a servant. But it didn't sound like Liv, either. Who, then?

Knowledge smote. “Marcovefa?” Hamnet said. “Why—?”

“Because I want to. Do I need more reason?” A man would have said it like that. But Hamnet's fingers told him she was no man. She slipped under the furs beside him. Her fingers began to roam, too.

“How did you get in?” Muzzy with sleep, he knew he was a couple of steps slower than he should have been. All the same, he was sure he'd barred the door when he came in. He hadn't wanted company. He had it, though.

Marcovefa laughed again. “I am a shaman, remember? If I want to be someplace, I go there. If I want something to be mine, I take it.”

“But—” Hamnet spluttered.

“Hush.” Her mouth came down on his. That shut him up in the most effective way imaginable. He raised his arms to push her away, but they went around her instead. She twisted a little so that his hands found her breasts. She made a noise somewhere between a purr and a growl when he squeezed them.

The bed was wide. He rolled her over so that his weight pinned her to the mattress. His mouth trailed down from hers to her nipples. She sighed and pressed his head down on her. His hand found the joining of her legs. Her breath caught. As he stroked her, she opened them wider. She was wet and wanton, waiting for him.

“Here,” she whispered. “I do for you.” She twisted in the red gloom. Her mouth came down on him.

“Easy,” he said as her tongue fluttered and teased. “Oh, easy. Or I'll—”

“So what?” She dove deep on him, so deep that she choked a little. That made her pull back a little, but she was laughing when she did.

More than a little of that and he would explode. He knew it, and Marcovefa had to know it, too. He didn't think she'd come here just for that, so he touched her cheek. She paused and made a questioning, wordless noise. “Let's do this,” he said, pressing his weight onto her again. He slid in with just the slightest of guidance. They began to move together, as if they'd been lovers for years.

Again, he thought he would finish too soon to satisfy her. When his mouth slid down to her breast again, though, she murmured something in her own dialect. There he was, nearly at the peak of pleasure, and there he stayed, and stayed, and stayed, till delight turned almost painful. Marcovefa gasped and quivered beneath him, again and again.

“Now?” she asked at last.

“Now!” Hamnet said. They were both sticky and slippery with sweat, sliding together. He reached the pinnacle, and seemed to fall from it forever. Marcovefa shivered one more time.

“Good?” she inquired brightly.

“My God,” he answered, and then, “Wait till I can see anything but fire in front of my eyes.” She must have liked that, for she laughed again. The motion made him slide out of her.

“Maybe you sleep now,” she said. Count Hamnet was inclined to think he'd sleep for the next month. This wasn't love—he'd known love twice now, and known it to turn on him and bite—but he'd never dreamt of so much animal pleasure. And then, mischief in her voice, she went on, “Or maybe . . .” That wasn't a complete sentence by itself, but what she did a moment later made it one.

After his sweaty exertions of a moment before, he hadn't thought he could rise again so soon. He hadn't thought he could rise again at all, not for days. But he surprised himself. Maybe—more likely—Marcovefa made him surprise himself. This time she rode him, less ferociously than he'd taken her. He didn't think she used any magic past that which any man and woman who please each other have. If he was wrong, he didn't much want to find out.

“There,” she said when they'd both spent themselves again. “Is that better?”

“Better than what?” Hamnet asked, which set her laughing all over again. It was better than almost anything he could think of.

Almost.
If Gudrid truly loved me, and if she were truly faithful . . .
The thought flickered through his mind like heat lightning on a summer night far to the south of Nidaros. Then sleep
did
smite him, and the darkness in the bedchamber was as nothing next to the black welling up from deep inside.

 

W
HEN HE WOKE
the next morning, he thought at first he'd dreamt it all. That couldn't really have happened . . . could it? But he needed only a heartbeat's more consciousness to realize he wasn't alone in the bed. The thin, gray light leaking in through tight-drawn shutters showed Marcovefa asleep beside him, a small smile on her face. Her features relaxed in slumber, she looked improbably young.

His eyes went towards the door. Yes, it was barred. She might have done that right after she came in. She might have got out of bed after he fell
asleep. She might have, yes. But he wondered whether it had ever been unbarred at all.

Marcovefa woke up a few minutes later. She looked confused for a couple of heartbeats, as if wondering where she was, and with whom. Then she grinned at Count Hamnet. “Good morning,” she said.

“The night was better.” He leaned over to kiss her. He half—more than half—hoped they would pick up where they'd left off, though he was anything but sure he could rise to the occasion.

But Marcovefa said, “We take care of one thing at a time. Now you are all right for a while, yes? So now we go and see what we can do to these Rulers.” The invaders still didn't seem to trouble her, even if they had everyone else below the Glacier from Trasamund to Sigvat in something close to a panic.

Hamnet wondered if he ought to resent being lumped with a water wheel that had got out of kilter. Pride and the memory of pleasure warred within him, but not for long. He couldn't stay offended, not when he remembered how she'd put him back in good working order.

Marcovefa slid out of bed, found the chamber pot, and squatted over it. Like the Bizogots, her folk needed less in the way of privacy than Raumsdalians did. She straightened up, still naked. Hamnet watched her in unfeigned admiration.

He looked around the room. He didn't see her clothes anywhere. Had she walked through the corridors of Eyvind Torfinn's house like that? Or—?

She fluttered her fingertips in a wicked parody of a gesture someone like Gudrid might have used. “See you at breakfast, sweetheart,” she said—and vanished. Hamnet didn't think she'd made herself invisible. She'd really disappeared; a soft
pop!
of inrushing air said as much.

Could Liv or Audun Gilli apport themselves like that? Count Hamnet shrugged. He didn't know. He only knew he'd never seen them do it.

He used the pot himself, then dressed in the clothes Sigvat's servants had given him. They would do for winter wear, though they weren't ideal. He would have stewed in his own juices wearing them in a summer heat wave here. A slow smile—not an expression he was used to wearing—stole across his face. His juices had done considerable stirring in the night.

He found his way to the dining room. Eyvind Torfinn was there, eating sausages and duck eggs and drinking a hot infusion of herbs. Gudrid was there, too. So was Marcovefa. The two of them ostentatiously ignored each other. Hamnet Thyssen nodded to Eyvind Torfinn, then walked up to the cook. “I'll have what the earl's having,” he said. “That looks good.”

“Help yourself to the sausages, Your Grace,” the man replied. “I'll give you your eggs in just a bit. Would you like two or three?”

“Three, please,” Hamnet answered. The sausages were venison, their flavor enlivened with garlic and fennel. When he had his eggs—almost as fast as the cook promised—he sat down by Marcovefa. Catlike, she leaned against him.

Gudrid never missed a signal like that. One of her elegantly plucked eyebrows leaped. “This time, of course, it will be pure happiness,” she said in a voice filled with vitriol.

“I doubt it,” Hamnet answered. “It will be what it is, that's all.”

Gudrid started to say something, then stopped with her mouth open. She must have expected him to come back with something like,
Of course it will.
His smile held a certain grim triumph. Sometimes getting the best of her even in tiny things felt more important than driving the Rulers beyond the Glacier.

Marcovefa pointed across at Gudrid. “She catches bugs, yes?” she said in the regular Bizogot tongue. Gudrid understood that well enough to close her mouth with a snap, and to redden in anger.

“Maybe we should all leave aside our quarrels, whatever they may be, until the happy day when the Rulers are defeated,” Eyvind Torfinn said, also in the Bizogot language.

His wife understood that, too, which was not to say she agreed with it. As Count Hamnet's own thoughts showed, he wasn't sure he agreed with it, either. Beating the Rulers was his duty. Getting one up on Gudrid was a pleasure, and one he didn't enjoy nearly often enough.

At the moment, though, Gudrid's anger seemed more likely to be aimed at Marcovefa than at him. Gudrid had squabbled with Liv, too, and hadn't liked what happened when she did. Would she remember that angering shamans and wizards wasn't a good idea?

“With the Emperor's order in my hand, I want to go north as soon as I finish here, Your Splendor,” Hamnet said. “And with me and the Bizogots out of your house, you should have peace again, God willing.”

“May it be so.” Eyvind Torfinn didn't sound convinced, and Hamnet had a hard time blaming him for that. Gudrid wasn't happy that he'd prevailed on Sigvat to open the dungeon. As far as she was concerned, Hamnet and Kormak Bersi could have stayed there till they rotted. She wasn't shy about making her opinions known, either. No, Earl Eyvind probably wouldn't have a happy time of it once his guests left.

Ulric Skakki walked into the dining room. He needed only a heartbeat to notice things there weren't much warmer than they would have been up on the Glacier. “Hello!” he said. “Have you called a truce, or shall I go back and get my sword and shield?”

“We have a truce,” Eyvind Torfinn said, with perhaps more optimism than conviction. “Come on, my friend. Eat. Refresh yourself.”

“I thank you kindly, Your Splendor,” Ulric said. “Better grub here than I'll get up on the road, that's for sure. I may as well fill up while I've got the chance. Knowing Hamnet, he'll want to get moving as quick as he can.”

“Your reputation precedes you,” Gudrid murmured to her former husband.

“If you're very lucky, people won't say the same thing about you,” Hamnet Thyssen replied. Gudrid bared her teeth at him. Eyvind Torfinn looked as if he wished he were drinking something stronger than his herbal infusion.

Ulric Skakki came back from the cook's station with enough food for three ordinary men. He was no Bizogot, but he could eat like one. He sat down and methodically started putting it away. Then Liv and Audun Gilli walked in. That might have made things even chillier, but Hamnet didn't think such a thing was possible.

Liv got a plate of food that rivaled Ulric's. Audun's eating habits were more sedate, or more typically Raumsdalian.
Do I want him along?
Hamnet Thyssen wondered. But that wasn't quite the right question.
Can I really stand to have him along?

He looked over at Liv. She wouldn't come north if he told Audun to stay behind. Why should she, when the Rulers had already conquered the Bizogots? Next to that, why did she, why should she, care a copper for what happened to the Empire? But Hamnet knew he needed her wizardry, and Audun's, too. They hadn't beaten the Rulers, but had challenged them. And if they worked with Marcovefa . . .

If they work with Marcovefa, I'm stuck with them
, he thought. Maybe, if he was sleeping with Marcovefa, seeing Liv wouldn't make him feel as if someone were sticking skewers into his marrow. He could hope it wouldn't, anyhow.

In strutted Trasamund. The Bizogot jarl had his arrogance back, however much it had suffered up on the frozen steppe. He waved to Count Hamnet, then went over to the cook and came back to the table with two large plates groaningly full of food. As he set them down, he growled, “Let's go north and kill all those miserable mammoth turds!”

“We will if we can,” Hamnet said. “This ought to be our best chance.”

“Nothing else matters. Nothing,” the Bizogot said, and fell to eating as if there were no tomorrow.

“Nothing?” Gudrid murmured. Did she mean the way he was stuffing himself, or was she thinking of herself first as she so often did? She'd taken him into her bed almost under Eyvind Torfinn's nose. Was she reminding him of it, again right past her husband? She hadn't been that shameless even with Hamnet—or, if she had, he hadn't noticed at the time.

Whatever she was looking for from Trasamund, she didn't get it. “Nothing!” he said emphatically, his mouth full of sausage.

Marcovefa laughed softly. Did she know what was going on there? Had she heard, or perhaps somehow divined it? Hamnet Thyssen didn't know. Gudrid couldn't have known, either, but her baleful stare said she didn't like any of what she was thinking. Still, all she did was stare. She must not have felt like taking on another wizard just yet.